Medical Practice Calendar

for Social Media Content for 2022

Elements of a Social Media Calendar

Every planned should be reflected as an entry in a social media calendar and broken down into a number of key elements. These can include:

• Target publication date and time for the post,
• Your social media channels (Blog, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc)
• Content Type
• Content Topic and URL
• Define Your Hashtags for linking and engagement
• Post Title, Structure and Copy of the Post
• Suitable Images (preferably resized for each channel's specific requirements) and Alt Tags
• Any Videos or video links,
• Anchor Links and tags to be included in the post
• Any additional relevant information (e.g. is this an Instagram feed post or a Story?)

Why Consider Using a Social Calendar?

Your practice and content marketing goals have take effort and attention every single day. Not just when you’re feeling inspired. Maintaining a social media calendar lets you plan ahead, batch your work, avoid multitasking, and note down all your creative brainwaves for later.

Basically it’s the best way to make sure you’ll never find yourself desperately scrolling through generic inspirational quotes hoping to find something to post ever again.

Why Post Consistently?

Whether you’re trying to increase your Instagram likes, your YouTube subscribers, or implemented social media KPIs, the first tip is “post consistently.” There’s just no shortcut around it.

Why? - Consistently showing up in your audience’s feed is the key to engaging them on social. Impressive engagement increases your organic reach via the platform’s algorithm, so your posts get shown to new eyes, and new patients start following your practice. And making genuine connections with a growing social community is the one true path to lifting your conversions.

Populating your social media calendar with posts ahead of time allows you to post consistently whether it’s a slow news week, or your biggest promotion of the year.

Benefits of Social Content Planning

Planning your posts ahead of time means that you can build failsafes into your workflow. Copy-editing the text, fact-checking information, or even vetting it with organizational stakeholders like the legal team or C-suite, are all a lot easier when you’re working days or weeks in advance.

A social media calendar—especially one with team member approvals built in—is the best way to prevent a low-key embarrassment like posting the same message across channels, or a high-key social media crisis.

A social media calendar allows you to strategically observe local or global moments that are relevant to your target patients. You will have time and a frameworks to allow spontaneous responses as well scheduled calendar event relevant to your practice.

Create High Quality Content

The medical marketing bar is rising. Social media production values have improved every year, and the notion of a lone-wolf Millennial tweeting memes from their beanbag chair has gone the way of the jeggings.

A social media posting is a creative process and can involve copywriters, designers, video editors, photographers and SEO experts. And asking a millennial staff member to drop everything for an emergency Instagram Story is not going to win hearts or minds. A social media calendar helps you allocate your assets—both human and digital—effectively, so that your team has the breathing room to do their best work.

And a long-term vision means you’re pushing a consistent brand voice and content that supports your marketing goals.

How to Create a Medical Social Media Calendar

There are 10 steps to creating an effective social media calendar, these are:

1. Understand your target audience and profile their needs and wants,
2. Define your content voice and overall message outcomes,
3. Ensure your social network channels are up to date
4. Understand each channels content requirements,
5. Choose your the most suitable social channels to match your message,
6. Decide what your content calendar frequency, and forward /schedule,
7. Make a content library for your assets and establish a workflow.
8. Start crafting your posts.
9. Invite your team to review, and use their feedback to improve.
10. Start publishing.